Is anyone working on improving the Excel node? The current limitations seem to me to be massive when it comes to tables and simple actions like creation and overwrite

Questions
1

I’m just wanting to understand if n8n is going to be useful for dealing with a number of critical excel files that are created by another process but which have to have additional data processing over the top of them.
It seems that the inability to do simple things like clear out a table or rename columns means that it is the wrong technology to use.

2

Hey @ElliotSmart welcome to the community.

It’s understandable to have those concerns, but n8n is definitely capable of handling the data processing tasks you’ve mentioned, including clearing tables and renaming columns.

3

At the moment, the limitations of the Graph API are such that all of my existing spreadsheets can’t be updated without drastic levels of work. I’m now contemplating moving everything into a database, but that is also massive. I’m an old timer when it comes to IT but new to n8n and a little out of practice in coding.

What’s the best way of clearing a table down to zero records without wiping out the table, because delete/recreate seems to be the only way and I cannot get it to work.

4

If you are talking about the relational DB and wish to delete all records in the database, but don’t want to be re-creating it every single time, what you are looking for is probably

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name;

This deletes the records, but preserves the table itself. A slightly slower way is to

DELETE FROM table_name;
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5

Thanks for that. I wasn’t specific enough… I’ve been trying to port an Excel ‘solution’ to n8n and Excel functionality in the n8n module is woeful. I’ve been trying to work out how to use Excel so that I can port it slowly, piece by piece. Looking into using Airtable instead now, so hopefully the Truncate call will be useful.

6

Oh Airtable, ok.
Airtable makes it a bit more difficult to delete all records at once. Their APIs only allow deleting a single record or records in batches of 10. There is no exposed functionality to delete all records in one go.

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